"I wondered if I should see you," he said.
"Did you expect to see me, then?"
"Well, I knew you often came here, and this morning I couldn't resist coming here myself."
Pauline felt a sudden impulse to run away; and yet most unaccountably the impulse led her into walking along with Guy at a brisk pace over the close-cropped glittering turf. Round them trotted Bob in eddies of endless motion.
"Listen," said Guy. "I'm sure I heard a lark singing."
They stopped, and Pauline thought that never was there so sweet a silence as here upon the summit of this green down. Guy's lark could not be heard. There was not even the faint wind that sighs across high country. There was nothing but gorse and turf and a turquoise sky floating on silver deeps and distances above the winter landscape.
"When the gorse is out of bloom, kissing's out of fashion," he said, pointing to a golden spray.
Pauline had heard the jingle often enough, but spoken solemnly like this by Guy on Wychford down it flooded her cheeks with blushes, and in a sort of dear alarm the truth of it declared itself. She was startlingly aware of a new life, as it were demanding all sorts of questions of her. She felt a shyness that nearly drove her to run away from her companion and yet at the same moment brought a complete incapacity for movement of any kind, an incapacity too that was full of rapture. She longed for him to say something of such convincing ordinariness as would break the spell and prove to her that she was still Pauline Grey; while with all her desire for the spell to be broken, she was wondering if every moment she were not deliberately offering herself to enchantment.
"Have you ever felt," Guy was asking, "a long time after you've met somebody, as if you had suddenly met them again for the first time?"
Pauline shook her head vaguely. Then with an effort she recaptured her old self and said laughing: